On a serious note — I agree. Mostly. In the Newtown case, no education of gun safety would have helped those kids. And as a teacher, I really don’t want to see most of my colleagues with a concealed carry.

I really believe that as a whole, we need to help identify those individuals who are unstable and get them the help they require. The shooter in this case had shown plenty of psychological problems prior to the event — he could have been helped.

oh, most definitely!! Canada has a slightly better system dealing with the mentally unstable. Doesn’t mean everything is dealt with nor does it mean everyone gets help. We do at least attempt to address the issue with the money the medical community receives. It can always be better.

Nah. That means depending on the government to do its job, and they have an awful track record at that, especially when there’s no money in it for them. Oh, they have a great track record of creating the new programs to suck in the new money, but when it comes to actually doing the job that money was supposed to pay for, not so much.

I mean, look at Child Protective Services is just about every state.

The Colorado movie theatre shooter is a case in point. He WAS diagnosed as a danger to others, and he WAS reported to the authorities by his shrink. The government did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about him until it was time to send somebody to draw the chalk outlines.

One of the biggest underlying challenges is: how do you objectively identify people who need to be hospitalized, institutionalized, or otherwise required to obtain help for mental problems without violating people’s civil rights? That will continue to be the biggest hurdle, and should be, to tackling mental health issues. I don’t want to live in a country where one single doctor could take away my civil rights and freedom because in his opinion I’m not mentally stable. Currently you have to basically have been adjudicated mentally unfit in order to be prevented from owning or purchasing firearms. So far, no one has come up with a better system to deal with the problem.

What’s most fucked up about the anti-gun crowd is that when the latest mass shooting happens, the bodies aren’t even in the ground before the call to further legislate away gun rights/ban guns is made. To me, it used to take a few weeks, maybe a month or so before we started hearing the ‘ban guns’ rhetoric; at least it was after the victim’s funerals. Now, the call seems to be automatic (fully automatic, actually; one pull of their trigger and they keep shooting their mouths off until they have nothing left to say). And we on the pro-gun side have to respond; we can’t afford to wait since they anti-gunners move faster these days so they can get legislation passed while emotions are still high.
And both sides accuse each other of dancing in the blood of the slain. However, one side takes the moral high ground on a pile of dead children who were in school or dead people who were minding their own business in a public place, and the other takes the moral high ground on a pile of dead who were stopped from committing murders, assaults, rapes, and other crimes, often by the victims of said crimes. Which pile of bodies is preferable to stand on? Ah, but we’re told not to focus on that, since the police are supposed to stop criminals, not the citrizenry, and by owning guns you support dead children, according to the Media. And forget about those law-abiding citizens with guns who’ve stopped mass shootings. Can’t talk about them in the news; it’d ruin their worldview.

According to a report I read a few months ago, civilians with guns have never stopped a mass shooting.

This is, in fact, true. A mass shooting requires at least 4 dead, and there have never been shootings where there was both a good guy with a gun and 4 or more people killed. Sometimes a bad guy was planning to kill many more than 4 people, but not once has one succeeded when there’s an armed civilian present.

NPR had an interesting story. Two of the parents of a Newtown victim are neurologists and looking for a reliable mental health test and funding to find one. The researchers are wanting to fund a foundation and look for traceable causes and a reliable test for them. Mental health diagnostics and treatment are at a 1950’s heart disease treatment level. Neural disease and science have a bad image from the practices continued up to the 1990’s. Some suggestions are MRI brain scan or video game behavioral testing. I believe that it is not the game, but traceable brain responses and nonresponses from game stimulus that could give clues. Several of the shooter’s acquaints marked him as TBAR.
I suggest a tax or donation of $.01 for every 10 bullets sold as a funding source.

Interesting, but there are a couple of problems with this idea. 1) the brain is immensely more complicated than the heart, which is one reason it is so far behind. And 2) if a test indicates you have heart disease, you are likely put on medication and in severe situations undergo surgical procedures. If a test indicates you are “mentally ill” you may have your civil rights and freedom stripped away.

I think technologies to help map the brain and provide insight to mental illness are great and should be pursued. But a test like that should not be used without concurrent behavioral observations. Otherwise we get all Minority Report with “predicting” behaviors, like mass shootings, before people have actually committed a crime or exhibited mentally ill behaviors.

“I suggest a tax or donation of $.01 for every 10 bullets sold as a funding source.”

No. The anti-gunners have been wanting to putatively tax guns and ammo for years, and this is opening the door just a crack for them. Nor would I support a $0.01 tax per 10 pages on every book, magazine, or newspaper sold if it were to go to fight illiteracy. Basic rights should not be taxed. Would you accept a $50 tax every time you invoked your 4th amendment rights during a cop-stop? Hell no!
Besides, leveling taxes on rights is already been declared verboten by the Supreme Court. There was a case where it was decreed a violation of free speech when a locality charged a tax for printers ink. Nor should there be a tax on bullets to support ANY cause.

PS- if you want to open a gun store, and charge $0.01/10 rounds for this charity, be my guest. Or a bookstore with a $0.01/10 pages extra fee to fight illiteracy, be my guest. It’s freedom of choice whether I want to support those causes or not. But adding taxes to support causes which work against my rights takes away my freedom of choice, my freedom of speech, and freedom of association.

Grant, you’ve hit on a major point here. As an Andrew Vachss reader, if these gun control jerks directed half their cash and lobbying power to supporting Protect.org, we’d not only see fewer deaths, but a drop in crime.

For those that don’t know, Vachss is the hardest of the hard boiled crime writers. His books are an outlet for the rage he develops as an attorney and child advocate in the court system. His first book, “A Bomb Built in Hell” is considered by many to have predicted the rampages we currently see.

Work on the mental health angle all you want – I agree it needs attention – but it can never 100% prevent nutjobs from arming themselves and doing bad stuff. There is no substitute for action and no excuse for legally preventing action where it’s needed. Teachers are charged with keeping our kids safe, they should have the option to carry. It’s for the children.

I think you are way off on this one. The car deaths=gun deaths trope? Really? How many of those car deaths were caused by one car at one time? It’s not the same and you know this, you have to, because you don’t seem to be a fool.

How many of the gun deaths were caused by one shooter at one time? Contrary to perception (see “misleading vividness”), mass shootings are very rare (just as airliner crashes are). A quick perusal of the article only showed two cases where multiple children died; in both cases, the shooters were themselves children and killed one child other than themselves. Perhaps I missed a mass shooting in there (although I’d think Mother Jones would have called that out), but otherwise, you’re talking about a very good analogy to car deaths–accidents that kill one or two at a time. (Other than the 50 or so that were intentional homicides by their parents, of course, but we’ve covered that already.)

Note that I’m defining the cases of intentional child shooters as “accidents”; the idea behind an age of majority is that a child cannot make rational judgements. Therefore, the cause is an adult failing to take proper safety precautions with a firearm; i.e., an accident.

I guess I was wrong. I haven’t always agreed with your opinions, or the content of this comic, but I’ve kept reading and even recommending it to others because it’s entertaining and the editorials you include and the discussions in the comment sections are normally very intelligent and thought provoking. You actually posted great views about the Bachman lion hunt, and people I’ve talked to or shown that have had to admit it was great logic and ,although begrudgingly, give up their knee-jerk reactions over it. I’m not anti-gun. Never was. I believe in responsible gun ownership and in beneficial uses of firearms for defense and hunting. You are obviously pro-gun, but a lot of your attitudes toward them (at least from what I gleaned from reading this page) mirrored a lot of my own. You’ve always spoken up for common sense toward their ownership and use, you’ve looked past the political aspects of the gun rights issues and dealt with it as it regards people’s lives and rights. Maybe I’m becoming a sentimental hack, and presuming a lot about your views from what I’ve read, if so then I can remedy that.

You won’t miss me as a reader.

Good luck with your endeavors. I will not be checking back in to see replies to this, or to know if the strip is still around in a year or so.

JS, the reason we bring up comparisons is first, to point out that a child’s death is heinous and awful no matter the cause. The thing we want is fewer dead kids, and we think that dealing with leading causes of child death — the 20% of causes that result in 80% of deaths — is going to save more kids than restricting gun ownership even further than the 20,000+ laws and regulations currently on the books do today. Our second reason is because it allows us to ask a very pointed question about motives: Is your goal to save the lives of children, or to restrict gun ownership?

The people of Newtown think the media should STFU? When has the media ever listened to anybody? When the “cop-killer bullets” story was breaking, police departments asked the media not to go public with the information, because it was not yet common knowledge that cops were wearing bullet-proof vests. The media went forward with it anyway, criminals increased their armament accordingly (although not by using the bullets in the report, which had already been unavailable to civilians), and cops’ lives were lost. The media’s coverage got great ratings, though. (Then, of course, a bill was proposed that would ban almost every bullet ever, the NRA earned the appreciation of the original proponent of the bill by helping rewrite it to what he had meant in the first place, and the media spent 30 years claiming that the NRA had opposed banning cop-killer bullets.)

Vyk, Just for clarity’s sake, depending on what you’re calling cop killer bullets (since the media loves to use that phrase for anything they don’t understand), the bullets in question weren’t ever unavailable to regular citizens. IE, “Black Talon” for their “Secret Teflon Coating that lets them shoot thru Kevlar” or whatnot. You can still buy the same bullet today (well, an IMPROVED model) under the Ranger SXT line The Black Color wasn’t teflon or anything, just oxidized copper coating. Winchester just stopped marketing them w/ that color, and they were always legal to sell on a national level. I won’t talk about insane jurisdictions that think some bullets are magically worse than others since they’re totally nonsensical.

Neither I nor the law referred to the Black Talon, which came out in 1991. NBC’s “cop-killer bullet” “special report” was in 1982, and the ban was passed in 1986. The ammunition that started the uproar was KTW ammunition, which its manufacturers voluntarily never sold to the general public.

On the other hand, I did like the snippet of Virginia law on that Wikipedia page. They banned a specific bullet from being used to commit a crime? …A crime that (by definition) is already illegal? Was the person proposing that law able to do it with a straight face?

Actual TV “News” died when the FCC rescinded its requirement that all broadcast channels had a requirement to produce a certain number of hours a day of news coverage. Print news has never seriously pretended to objectivity.

“Fuck prohibition. Teach your children gun safety.” I’d add, teach your children to stay aware of their surroundings. There’s no “green zones” where they should turn off their awareness (as some gunnies call it, “condition white”) and feel completely safe, because there is no such thing. There’s enough news stories to show that everywhere that we’d like to think of as sanctuaries, like churches, hospitals, and schools, can be deadly grounds when some crazy with a gun or car or poison or axe, comes along with evil intent and willfully ignores any and all signs that prohibit weapons on those premises.

I’ve read online of some parents teaching their children contrary to what the schools teach them, with regards to an “active shooter”, where the school’s instructions are to hunker down and wait for the police, and these parents are telling their children, get away from there as fast as possible; break a window and climb out if you have to, but do NOT stay there and wait, because the cops can’t get there fast enough to stop a bullet!

Let’s look at 2010 data.
Question: How many kids 14 and under died in vehicle accidents (i.e., none of the 16 year old dumb drivers, I’m just going for ‘kids’ to force the sample size even lower)? And how many from firearms (including suicides!)? And how many from drowning?
Answer: Out of a total population aged 14 and under of 61,227,213, there were 1,225 deaths from vehicle accidents, and 380 from any event involving any type of firearm (80 were firearm suicides, which was basically 1/3 of the 274 suicides taking place in that age range, and 62 of the shootings were listed as unintentional hunting or gun handling accidents), and 786 from drowning.

Yes, a child is at least 4X as likely to be killed in a car accident than in an issue involving a firearm in any fashion, and that number climbs if you restrict it to how likely a child is to be the victim of gun violence by removing some of the suicide cases by saying “OK, let’s just assume my kid won’t have access to a gun to kill himself, so how likely is he to be a victim of someone else’s violent act?”.

Guns are just pieces of metal and plastic. The best remedy to gun accidents for kids is to educate them; take ‘em out shooting!

I feel compelled to play devil’s advocate. A child is four times as likely to be killed in a motor vehicle accident than by a firearm, but how many households have both children and firearms, vs households with both children and motor vehicles? I don’t actually know the answer, but intuitively I’d expect that children are exposed to the risk of a motor vehicle accident more often then they are exposed to the risk of a firearm accident; far more than four times as often. That said, something like 50% of U.S. households have guns (see Kleck below for number of households with guns, and the US Census for number of households), so perhaps my expectation is incorrect.

Conversely, the risk of death by drowning specifically in a swimming pool is roughly on par with the risk of a firearm accident, even though there are vastly more households with firearms than households with swimming pools. (Gary Kleck claimed, in his 1997 book Targeting Guns, 5 million U.S. households with swimming pools and 43 million U.S. households with firearms.) This is based on my recollection; if I remember correctly, finding statistics for drowning that included where the victim drowned was quite difficult, and I don’t remember where I had found this. A shocking number of children’s drowning deaths are in bathtubs, or even buckets, rather than swimming pools. (I think I can safely state that there are more than 5 million U.S. households with bathtubs or buckets.)

Of course, as always, we see a huge percentage of firearm deaths to be intentional suicide. One argument I have heard is that, given that firearms are the most effective form of suicide, fewer suicide attempts would be successful without access to firearms, and there would thus be fewer suicide deaths from the same number of suicide attempts if we banned guns. (Whether I buy that assertion and whether the point is relevant are topics of their own.)

Do you have stats for how many suicide attempts are successful in various countries? Those are not statistics that I’ve seen. Japan’s suicide rate is through the roof, but if the majority of people who attempt to kill themselves fail and then don’t try again, there’s some amount of prevention there. On the other hand, if it just means the average suicidal person tries to kill themselves more times with the same ultimate success rate, then there’s no positive effect. (One could even argue that there’s a negative effect by increasing their suffering.)

I’ll reiterate that I was mostly playing devil’s advocate there. However, I really have heard that argument made, and really haven’t been able to find statistics to bolster it either way (other than the overall suicide rate, which doesn’t seem to support either side).

Hey for the bitcoin thing coinbase.com makes it pretty easy to set up (a lot like paypal) and has nice donate or buy buttons that automaticly covert between bitcoin and USD. email me if you help or info.

I posted the following on my FB page yesterday, and shared it on some pro-2A pages as well. Anti’s lost their damn minds.

“I am not Newtown. Newtown refused to properly defend their children, and to take care of their community members, and I am not to blame simply because I own guns similar to those used in that incident. I am NOT Newtown.”